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Comment by BinaryIdiot | Hacker News Reader

I'm convinced that TLDs will slowly fade away. They're not very intuitive, especially if they're not a .com and the user is not very technical. I know Google would love for search to basically replace the need for them but I doubt that'll entirely happen. But I don't think they are long for this world.

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I agree with your analysis that TLDs are mostly useless. But I doubt that's enough reason to believe they'll go away - if history is any indication, IP will seldom go away, whether useful or not, since whole industries tend to spring up around it.

Tell that to Telex, AOL keywords, fax, long distance telephone networks, cassette tapes, pager numbers, the BBS, film developing, etc. There are whole areas of IP and technical ecosystems that --- while they have not completely disappeared --- have become obsolete and their daily use and commercial value has plummeted.

What do you think will take their place? Do you think something will replace DNS?

That's the tough part. People overwhelmingly just search for the site they want and go to it that way so it's hard to figure out what would take its place other than some form of search. But a lot of people seem to be thinking about this (I remember Google announcing a while ago that they were looking at how DNS could be replaced).

I don't know what a good answer is. From the user perspective it'll likely look more like a search. but technically? Honestly it could remain DNS just abstract away from the TLDs to make them not mean as much.

At least that's my opinion.

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